Revisiting mental health nursing in the 1960s

Abstract

The 1960s were arguably one of the most significant periods in 20th century mental health care in the UK. The anti-psychiatry movement was vociferous and highly influential in hastening the demise of institutionalised psychiatry. A new generation trained as psychiatric nurses, men and women who had not lived through the experience of the Second World War and no inclination to revere or preserve the past. Many identified strongly with post-war liberal attitudes and were keen to challenge received wisdom and traditional sources of authority. Overcrowding and understaffing in the psychiatric hospitals combined with escalating NHS costs to force providers of mental health services to turn towards the community as the location of care. This paper seeks to locate mental health nursing within the socio-political context of the time and describes the prevailing climate in which mental health nursing was conducted. It considers some of the significant changes that took place in institutionalised mental health care during the 1960s, and offers three short biographies of nurses who entered psychiatric nursing during this period. Finally, links are drawn from the past to the present to illuminate the situation in which contemporary mental health nursing finds itself.